What Alan Yau opened this famous Milanese bakery in London six months ago. It was designed by Claudio Silvestrin who likes to give informal dining a minimal, sophisticated look. With self-service, communal tables and a wide range of snacks, this is a great pit-stop for the peckish.Order We loved the cannoli pastries.Costs Under £10. Best time to go Any time you're hungry; it's open from 7am until midnight. Rating 8/10

My long-rooted impression of Chinese restaurants in Britain is that, by and large, the food is delicious but the service execrable. Waiters exploit every possible way of making us uncomfortable; though the room is almost empty they urge us to tables at which no sane man could ever wish to sit, hustle us impatiently into our choices, and bring food and drink in random disorder so that none of us knows whose dish is whose; with unaccountable delays in delivery one of us will either have finished before others have begun, or, having waited, must wade through cold and turbid food that is only worth eating when warm and delicate.

Modern definition tends towards the euphemistic. 'Folically challenged' is kinder than saying that someone's bald. And those who might once have defined their lifestyle as penurious because they had to flog the family home can nowadays bask in the knowledge that they are simply 'downsizing'.

Alan Yau wasn't as happy as I was expecting. Having neatly evaded this week's stock market crash, the 45-year-old Hong Kong-born entrepreneur recently sold a majority stake in his fashionable restaurants, the Michelin-starred Hakkasan and Yauatcha - which today have been reconferred with a star apiece - to the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority for £30.5 million.

We rang to book a table for dinner at Loong Kee Café and the reservation was accepted. When we arrived and announced the booking to a member of staff, he looked at first bemused and then slightly hunted. The fact that there was one table available was, I think, a complete coincidence.